Not to mention top end raid gear in SoF is 900+ hp. While Tradeskill stuff with last bloods might get 700's the raiders with all slots SoF tier 4 will still maintain a large gap. As for right now a few demi people with deep pockets are enjoying a leap on the leader boards.

the 75 augs are selling for 300K but I logged into other servers and found the prices more in the 75-150K range. Best thing would be farm the items and know a good tradeskiller in guild.

Yeah the gear in this expansion is stupid in so many ways. Attunable drops with 320 hp and/or mana and that is tier 2? New players made that the sublime augs alone are 320-330? So what are our raid plans now? Farm last blood and ts items and gear up peeps so we can do SoF? There are a number of things I like about his expansion but the gear is just stupid.

As far as I know we are still going to progress through the expansions as previously planned. The weapons that drop in the group content are not as good as raid weapons, so to achieve the DPS that we need for later raids we will still need to keep going through DPoB and DK. Another thing about the group gear is the AC on most of the items is considerably lower than the raid gear. Without well AC'd tanks we aren't going to progress at all, so the old raids are not obsolete for raiders. The group gear is basically just there to make the group only type people feel like they are able to catch up to the raiders a bit.

Tier 4 groupable gear is very nice but not obtainable by anyone in the guild yet. I decked out a level 80 warrior in it during beta and unbuffed was over 3500 AC and 24,000 hp. Adding in some raid weapons or weapon shield and that would be even better. Thats with the group 4 tier stuff, not counting what you could have with the best tradeskill stuff + last blood, probably around 4KAC and 26000 hp.

Getting to level 80 and keyed will be the fun part and having the gear needed to kill the stuff in Tier 4. All this gear just makes catching up to end game faster if people put in non raid hours to gear themselves up. I like the gear, makes the hard core grouper closer to raid level, should lessens the gap between casual and end game raider and make group content fun, hard and challenging for months to come for the grouper and raider alike.

I think a reasonable level of group gear would be around DK level, basically phasing out level 70 content.

There is no need to bring the "grouper" up to the level of an endgame raider. How many group missions (pre SoF) could someone decked out in all top end TBS group gear not do?

Sure I will probaly get the L80 cultural, symbol and Last Blood armor eventually as it becomes available on the bazaar, but a 175AC, 650 hp breastplate for a Demiplane level Knight seems kind of overpowered, when the only mob I would have to kill is Zi Thuli.